David McCooey

Who is David McCooey?

Professor David McCooey, poet, critic, musician, and academic, was born in London in 1967. He moved to Perth, Western Australia, with his family in 1970. He studied at University of Western Australia, and completed his doctorate at Sydney University.

He is Personal Chair in Literary Studies and Professional & Creative Writing at Deakin University in Geelong and regularly writes reviews for Australian Book Review and The Age. He has been the recipient of a number of ARC awards. From 2004-2006 he was associate editor of Space: New Writing and in 2013 he was inaugural poetry editor of Australian Book Review.

McCooey, described by Nicholas Birns in The Australian as ‘one of the pioneers of Australian studies of life writing’, is the author of a key critical work in Australian autobiography, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996, and re-published in 2009. Artful Histories won a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1996, and was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award for Best Australian Book in 1997.